RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)


  • Worse than John McCain?

    Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
    by Ron Paul

    “Following President Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday about the Iran War, stock markets suffered losses while oil prices rose. The decline in stocks and increase in oil prices reflected disappointment over President Trump’s failure to articulate a plan to end the Iran War and the related restraint of shipping through of the Strait of Hormuz. The average gas price in America has risen to over four dollars per gallon since the US and Israel launched their war against Iran at the end of February. The increased cost of gas is raising prices at the pump and, by increasing shipping costs, resulting in higher prices at grocery stores and even on Amazon.” (04/06/26)

    http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/worse-than-john-mccain

  • Democratic Party faces its internal demons on US-Israel policy — again

    Source: Semafor
    by David Weigel

    “Rank-and-file Democratic support for Palestinians has surged since 2024 and risen more since last summer, but there are influential party leaders who disagree. The US-Israel attacks on Iran are more unifying inside the party. Democrats are against them and happy to blame them for rising prices. But the demand for the official party to take a position is fraught with risk, at a moment when the party is feeling good about the issues this midterm election will be fought over.” (04/06/26)

    https://www.semafor.com/article/04/06/2026/democratic-party-faces-its-internal-demons-on-us-israel-policy-again

  • A Look at Our Material Progress

    Source: Independent Institute
    by Alex Tokarev

    “Year after year, we are told by whoever is in opposition and seeks to get elected to a public office that life is getting harder. Young people can’t afford anything. That America was somehow better ‘back then.’ And ‘back then’ usually means 50 or 100 years ago, times often romanticized by Hollywood, but when life was actually much harder and less enjoyable. The truth is that, in material terms, we live in the best of times. And it will get better even when we hit a few bumps by electing the occasional socialist. Life now is much more affordable, safer, healthier, and full of opportunity than it was a century ago. Profit-seeking undertakers, the ones politicians love to demonize, are making everything more abundant, convenient, and reliable.” (04/06/26)

    https://www.independent.org/article/2026/04/06/a-look-at-our-material-progress/

  • What Hegel Knew About Trump

    Source: Persuasion
    by John B Judis

    “Hegel viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval. He assigned to what he called “world-historical individuals” a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another. These individuals didn’t necessarily grasp the full import of what they were doing, and their actions, while transformative, didn’t necessarily result in the outcomes they intended. Trump, I have come to believe, is exactly such an individual: He is speeding the transition from one historical era to another. The ultimate results are very unlikely to line up with his exact ideological aims, but they will be profound. And the world is never going back to what it was.” (04/06/26)

    https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-hegel-knew-about-trump

  • What Would Robert Louis Stevenson Say about Ozempic?

    Source: Brownstone Institute
    by Ann Bauer

    “Ozempic and its cousins (Mounjaro, Wegovy, Zepbound, et al.) modify the pleasure centers of the brain, making everything people crave — food, sex, smoking, alcohol, shopping, gambling, cocaine — less appealing. It doesn’t address the underlying problems of addiction, such as depression or dishonesty. It just eliminates the part of the person that enjoys and revels, the colorful, joyous side. It’s a version of the drug in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that the doctor ginned up to divide himself, creating a respectable man bound by reserve and a separate murderous, pleasure-seeking monster.” (04/06/26)

    https://brownstone.org/articles/what-would-robert-louis-stevenson-say-about-ozempic/

  • Israelis don’t pay for the weapons we “sell” to them — US taxpayers do

    Source: Responsible Statecraft
    by Stephen Semler

    “U.S. arms sales to Israel aren’t really sales, at least not in the typical sense. Israel’s position as purchaser in these weapons deals isn’t synonymous with funder. This is made clear in the arms sales notifications themselves. Consider the four most recent notified arms sales to Israel published in the Federal Register: $740 million for armored personnel carriers, $1.98 billion for tactical vehicles and accessories, $3.8 billion for attack helicopters and related weaponry, and $150 million for utility helicopters and parts. After ‘Prospective Purchaser,’ all these notifications list Government of Israel. After ‘[Funding Source,’ all list Foreign Military Financing — or FMF, the U.S. military aid program through which Israel receives at least $3.3 billion a year. In practice, FMF functions as a gift card for Israel to spend on weapons. U.S. taxpayers are stuck paying for the gift card.” (04/06/26)

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-arms-sales-to-israel/

  • Thin Libertarianism: Ideal Theory, PPE, & the Real World

    Source: ProSocial Libertarians
    by Andrew Jason Cohen

    “My own ideal theory is a classical liberal (libertarian) theory based on toleration. The view is necessarily very thin as it accepts that each person should be free to choose and act on their own conception of the good and thus live very different sorts of lives. All of those are to be tolerated unless they involve harm to others. … Importantly, having an ideal theory does not mean thinking we ought to stop with ideal theory. … I must recognize that there will be scenarios in the real world that challenge my own intuitions about what ought to be permitted when people would have difficulty exiting even when their right to do so is protected and figure out how to respond to that.” (04/06/26)

    https://prosociallibertarians.substack.com/p/thin-libertarianism-ideal-theory

  • US Troops In Iran Need To Start Disobeying Orders

    Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
    by Caitlin Johnstone

    “At this point if you’re in the US military you have a moral obligation to start refusing orders. Desert. Become a conscientious objector. Ideally, get everyone together and launch a full-scale military coup. We’re in ‘Mad King’ territory. Someone’s gotta do what needs to be done. Promoters of this war told the world it was about liberating the Iranian people from tyranny to bring them freedom and democracy. Now that they got their war it’s about bombing them ‘back to the Stone Age,’ stealing their oil, and blowing up their bridges and power plants. The only people dumber than Americans who bought into Trump’s ‘ending the wars’ shtick are the Iranians who believed the United States was going to bring freedom to their country.” (04/06/26)

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/04/06/us-troops-need-to-start-disobeying-orders-in-iran-and-other-notes/

  • The Populist War on Technological Capacity

    Source: The Dispatch
    by Mar Oestreich

    “This global race for AI dominance through abundant, scalable power and computation is already underway. Yet much of our domestic debate fixates on scarcity as if the pie were fixed forever, which leads to moralized calls about who then gets to use the limited resources we have. Once electricity becomes a hierarchy of virtue, you may not like where you land. This reflex is bipartisan. On the right, suspicion settles on coastal tech elites siphoning power from ‘real Americans.’ On the left, it gathers around corporate excess and environmental harm. When confidence in builders erodes, it does not leave a vacuum: Gatekeepers step forward. … Once you decide the pie cannot grow, an authority must divide it, looking for villains, assigning virtue, declaring some uses essential and others indulgent.” (04/06/26)

    https://thedispatch.com/article/ai-data-centers-nimby/

  • Overcoming Failures of Imagination

    Source: Underthrow
    by Max Borders

    “In a 1961 speech, President John F. Kennedy captured the imagination of the people. He asked the world to see a man on the moon. Back then, such could only be a feat of technocracy — the idea that officials can work wonders if they have enough experts and largesse. And they did it. But, the moon landing had been peak technocracy — pushing the limits of what could be achieved in terms of expense, tax funding, and complication. Prior to that, though, Kennedy had put a symbol in people’s minds.” (04/06/26)

    https://underthrow.substack.com/p/overcoming-failures-of-imagination

  • One Blow After Another: The Leadership Team from Hell on a Hell of a Planet

    Source: TomDispatch
    by Michael Klare

    “On March 13th, buried in the New York Times’s coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: ‘As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.’ Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%. Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off.” (04/05/26)

    https://tomdispatch.com/the-leadership-team-from-hell-on-a-hell-of-a-planet/